'100 years of difficult work': Richmond removes final public Confederate monument

The last public Confederate statue in Richmond, Virginia, was removed Monday after months of delays.

Bystanders cheered as workers lifted the statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill from its base with a crane and lowered it onto a truck lined with tires, according to video from the scene.

"Richmond had more Confederate monuments than any other city in the United States of America. And we were the former capital of Confederacy. And so this wasn't just two years of work. This was 100 years of difficult work," Mayor Levar Stoney told reporters Monday. "And I'm proud that we've now arrived at this moment in our history."

Why are confederate statues being taken down?

The city removed more than a dozen of its Confederate monuments in the wake of the racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

But the effort to remove the Hill statue was more complicated because Hill's remains were buried beneath it. Hill's indirect descendants agreed to allow the city to move Hill's remains to a cemetery in Culpeper, but argued in court that they should have control over where to relocate the statue. Circuit Court Judge David Eugene Cheek Sr. ruled against them in October.

Debate persists over Confederate monuments

John Hill, 33, one of the descendants who challenged the monument's removal in court, told the Washington Post he drove eight hours from Ohio to watch the statue be taken down.

“We just don’t want to see it destroyed because that’s a headstone with our family name on it,” Hill said.

Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, said previous administrations made the decision to remove the statues.

"As the governor has said before, he firmly believes that we must not airbrush our history," Porter said in a statement. "The governor believes that we must not overlook or excuse the sins of our past but we must resist the movement to cleanse our history."

Brandon Fountain, chief operating officer of the Black Lives Matter group in Richmond, told USA TODAY he was also among a group of about 30 people gathered to watch the statue come down. Fountain said once the statue was removed, workers began chipping away at the base as people in the crowd handed out coffee and doughnuts.

"It was overdue," Fountain said. "Today is my birthday, so I looked at it like a gift."

More: 82 schools have removed their racist namesakes since 2020. Dozens now honor people of color.

SPLC Data: Nearly 100 Confederate statues were removed in 2020, but hundreds remain

What happens to Confederate monuments after they are removed?

Richmond plans to move the statue to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, where many of the other monuments were taken earlier this year.

A 131-year-old Robert E. Lee memorial statue, which served as both a symbol of Confederate heritage and the unofficial ground zero of racial equity demonstrations in Virginia's capital, was removed in September 2021.

Other memorials owned by the city of Richmond, including those celebrating Confederate Army Gens. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and James E.B. Stuart, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Navy Adm. Matthew Fontaine Maury, were removed shortly after the Virginia General Assembly passed a law in 2020 allowing localities to decide how to deal with Confederate monuments on public property.

Are there more Confederate monuments?

Though hundreds of Confederate statues have been removed around the country, more than 700 monuments are still standing in addition to hundreds of roadways, schools, parks, military bases, bodies of water and bridges honoring Confederates as of Jan. 20, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s database.

Lawrence West, chief executive officer of BLM RVA, said more work needs to be done to remove these other symbols of the Confederacy, like renaming Richmond's Robert E. Lee Memorial Bridge.

"It's definitely a relief," West said. "There are definitely a lot of other symbols of oppression that are around...the statues are just the starting point."

More: Virginia grapples with Confederate names on side streets, counties vary in approach

Contributing: The Associated Press

Contact Breaking News Reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg at nyanceybra@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @NdeaYanceyBragg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Richmond removes Confederate monument to General Hill in Virginia